Heroes of Running: Pat Farmer

Farmer completed a 10-month, 13-day running journey from the North to the South Pole.

Thirty-one miles into his run through the Peruvian desert, Pat Farmer got nervous. His support crew was not at the checkpoint. Anticipating the worst, Farmer refilled his two empty water bottles with urine. He ran 12 miles to the next checkpoint--still, no crew. (Radiator problems, he'd learn.) He drank the urine and slept in the desert. If not for a passing convoy of miners who gave him water the next morning, Farmer says, he would have died.

The harrowing account is one of many that Farmer, 50, can tell after completing his 10-month, 13-day running journey from the North to the South Pole last January. The Sydney native has long been a successful ultrarunner, having circumnavigated Australia on foot and run across the United States twice. The 13,000-mile, top-to-bottom effort was a "lifelong dream" but also an opportunity for Farmer to raise more than $1 million for the Red Cross. His main objective was to support clean-water projects, although in some of the 14 countries he traversed, he tailored fund-raising toward local initiatives like building hospitals in Mexico. "I'd been to communities in southeast Asia that didn't have clean drinking water," he says. "I watched kids die of simple things like diarrhea. It's something that can so easily be prevented."

Farmer took roughly 21 million steps on his "Pole to Pole Run." Some were harder than others. In the Arctic, his photographer nearly died after falling through the ice into the ocean. In Nicaragua, a group of drunk, machete-wielding youngsters accosted him. Amazingly, Farmer never took a day off despite blisters, bruises, and swollen and torn tendons. "It's about gutting out the tough times," he says. "With ultramarathon running, you have to keep coming up with something that's more difficult, in order to capture people's imagination."